潜入洞穴里探秘龙潭

最近有一部好莱坞惊险大片《夺命深渊》,描述了一批洞潜探险家来到巴布亚新几内亚原始森林里探索洞穴,当他们进入一个地下洞穴潜水探险不久,就遇着大暴雨,沙石雨水滚滚落下封死了洞口,他们只得摸索着另一条水路希望能逃出生天,最终仅一人逃过这场劫难.故事情节跌宕起伏,扣人心弦,让人们领略了洞潜的惊心动魄. 有人说,水下世界是这个星球上最神秘,最令人兴奋,最引人入胜的地方之一.近年来自携式水下呼吸器潜水(SCUBA diving)取得了长足的发展,使得潜水活动从冒险家的特权变成普通人都能参与的运动.     

Stating space in modern Mexico

This paper critiques the largely Anglophone “New Cultural History” (NCH) written on post-revolutionary Mexico, calling for a more robust theoretical and methodological approach to the state than scholars have thus far employed. Earlier trends, each of course inflected with the politics of their times, remained fastened upon the purportedly unified force of Mexican officialdom. Revisionist narratives tended to abstract the state from social and cultural belief and practice. As such, scholars' grasp of social change was weakened by their failure to see politics, culture, and society as interrelated processes. Nevertheless, the closer examination of popular culture stressed by some contemporary historians—an undeniably important analytical tack—still does not obviate the need for a solid, at times even central, focus on processes of state-formation. Herein, I review some of the critical contributions to a growing multidisciplinary field of state/culture studies, and from critical human geography, and suggest ways their insights might be useful for historians and historical geographers focusing on the post-revolutionary Mexican state.     

Mexican anthropologists in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara. Boundaries and Paradigms: The Anthropological Study of Rural Life in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Leiden Development Studies No. 4; 1982. 355 pp. (price not given) to be republished by Routledge and Kegan Paul).     

Monuments and nationalism in modern Mexico

A key feature in the cultural repertoire of Mexican nationalism has been the excavation and reconstruction of the archaeological sites and monuments of the pre‐Hispanic past. They afford tangible witness to the foundations of Mexican history and the putative existence of the Mexican people in the civilisations of Mesoamerica. Although in the colonial period creole patriots identified the Aztec empire as their classical past, it was not until the Mexican Revolution that archaeological sites and monuments were integrated into the nationalism that accompanied and characterised that movement. The chief author of this cultural turn was Manuel Gamio, a professional archaeologist and liberal nationalist, whose extensive writings thus demand attention. But although he emphasised the grandeur of the pre‐Hispanic civilisation, he advocated the complete incorporation of the contemporary Indian peasantry into the Mexican nation.     

Historic figurines from Florida and Mexico

Historical Archaeology -     

Trajectories of Culture in West Mexico

Explaining culture change requires a multi-dimensional approach, and so does explaining cultural continuity. I combine several approaches to explain why the account given of a Mexican town's history changed between 1879 and 1992. I also identify and explain what did not change during the period, as well as during the subsequent period of fieldwork itself, 1992–2005. Rather than treat cultural continuity as the result of inertia, I follow Urban ([2001], Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) in looking for what motivates the transmission of culture as well as what pathways it takes, although I prefer to stress human agency in writing of the trajectories along which people propel culture, in this case a town's history. One approach which I draw, for explaining the trajectories of culture, is Malinowski's seminal study of Trobriand myths (1926), but I combine it with the more recent approaches that link versions of history to the interests of social groups; highlight the density of ties between person, people and place; pay attention to the genre of narratives being transmitted, and to the skewing of culture towards central places; and finally, consider shifts not just in the figure of particular narratives but in the grounds that underlie them, such as the criterion of truth against which narratives are measured.     

墨西哥,仙人掌的王国

<正>仙人掌原产于美洲,从美国的北部到南美洲的南部,分布很广,种类也很多。墨西哥位于北美洲南部,绝大部分属热带高原、海洋水汽难以到达闭塞的内部,北部又在副热带高气压带控制范围,年降水量少,荒漠分布很广。严峻的环境似乎给人和植物的生存都带来巨大的挑战,干旱缺水永远都是不毛之地的代名词,可是恣意生长的仙人掌却装点了这片土地。     

Reflections on the Transformation in Mexico

This article offers panoramic portrait of Mexican politics since the election victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena movement in July 2018. Along its path to overwhelming success, Morena presented a vision of a historic transformation of a thoroughly corrupted Mexican state. Morena’s opponents viewed its emergence with anxiety, as a radical, populist, leftist force. But the new regime has been extremely cautious, affirming existing geopolitical and security commitments and pursuing conservative macroeconomic policies. Working within these constraints, the López Obrador government has largely focused on a moral transformation of the state. The context of Morena’s victory was the ongoing collapse in the Mexican state’s monopoly of force and its historic complicity with criminal and paramilitary violence. The government’s post-election approach has included a public reckoning with state crimes, from 1968 to Ayotzinapa. But its primary strategy has been one of ostentatious political asceticism. Rhetorically, this encompasses ideas of ‘political love’ and ‘republican austerity’; in practical terms, it includes campaigns of public frugality and the performative vulnerability of the president himself. In closing, we analyse the proposed National Guard, arguably the centrepiece of Morena’s putative state transformation, a policy condemned by some as renewed militarisation in the name of utopian republicanism.